52. Six Months on the Floor, Then a Business with Jocelyn Singer-Sargent

Jocelyn Singer-Sargent is the founder of Jocelyn Singer-Sargent Consulting, known as "the work whisperer." She's an HR consultant, coach, and speaker based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, dual-credentialed as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and a SHRM-certified HR professional. Her practice spans fractional HR leadership, manager training, employee engagement, and coaching for leaders who want to build people strategies that actually work, including her work on building collaboration "from Boomers to Zoomers." In this episode, Jocelyn and Jack dig into how she stumbled into HR from a background in clinical social work, why the "employee handbook" is really a mirror of company culture, and how she built her entire consulting practice on word of mouth with zero family entrepreneurial background to draw on. She also gets into the moment she burned out of corporate HR, slept on the floor with her dogs for six months, and used a borrowed contract template to land her first client. It's a scrappy story from start to finish. Chapters: 0:00 Welcome and Santa Fe fun fact 1:09 Jocelyn's scrappy small town roots 2:46 Growing up in a no entrepreneurs household 6:34 What Jocelyn does for businesses today 9:19 Who her clients are and the 50 employee turning point 11:34 From clinical social work to accidental HR 20:00 Reading a company through its employee handbook 28:24 Burnout, the floor nap era, and starting the business 36:25 Referrals, the dog park network, and speaking engagements 40:07 Scrappy vs sophisticated lightning round Jocelyn Singer-Sargent's Links: Website: http://www.jocelynsingersargent.com LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jocelyn-singer-sargent-lcsw-shrm-cp-47399849 Jack Tompkins' Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-tompkins/ Consulting: https://www.pineapplecf.com AI Analyst Product: https://www.pineappleanalyst.ai/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCalnj5yLU0ZH9y_tVl1J4ng